RE: Too easy

 Joyce Park wrote:
> I noticed that your writeup was almost entirely focused on enterprise
> issues,and we have to date mostly been interested in consumer software.

I guess it is easier to be concrete about certain things when cast in the
light of business issues - easier to justify. However I see no real
difference with them. Maybe the "goal" is different, time and dollar verses
social and personal but in the end we are talking about applications that
people *choose* to use, or have to use.

Integration is still an issue when considering weblogging. If anything,
weblogging and search-engines are about the only application integration
efforts that are truly operating at internet-scale (they are independently
owned and operated applications that depend on independently owned and
operated applications to generate customer value).

Bad choice "business", substitute "users'". I used business process,
workflow and business rules to mean why the software exists and what the
software has to do. Business Process is the top level...all about people
coordinating activities and collaborating to achieve some goal - The
Language Action perspective[1].

> and also we have found it's not as easy to interest the enterprise
> in our featherweight, flexible, standards-based solutions as one
> might assume.

That's because one assumes purchase decisions are made on the merits of a
technology. I've found that technology has nothing to do with it, rather it
is all about perceived reputation and personal trust. Call this "keeping my
job" syndrome - I'm not going to get fired for putting MS Office on every
Desktop (as a side note, I thought that [2] is a good short essay that
explains social cluelessness as I've experienced it).

> focus on things that will immediately appeal to the widest group
> of developers.

So mod_pubsub is targeting the developer mainstream? I'd say they aren't
ready for it yet. The mainstream developers don't have a clue about Async
Messaging, full stop...the only reason they might even touch it is because
there is some wizard in the IDE that does it for them. And the gang-of-five
have spent a billion or two defining the memes "Loosely Coupled",
"Messaging" and "Standard" to mean something formed in their own likeness.

Wait for the mainstream to understand HTTP first! But please don't hold your
breath, you might drown. As a first step the group can help educate the
market by explaining HTTP supports a continuous resource representation.
i.e. mod_pubsub doesn't exploit a HTTP backdoor (as your friend suggested it
did).

> Everyone can understand an encrypted chat or notifications via
> IM; not everyone can understand a particular business workflow
> management implementation -- and even those who do won't find it
> especially sexy.

ah, sex appeal! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...so what is sexy?
My guess - programming the "NetOS", social revolution and fame. Does that
sum up blogging?

Programming the "NetOS" appeals to me and that is where I see mod_pubsub as
the (excuse the cliche) disruptive technology - not because of events and
in-browser updates but because resources are queues, URLs are universally
cheap and it is a web citizen. It represents a different, internet scalable
way of developing *net-native* applications. The problem is that
applications are thought of and conceived as monolithic entities when they
need not be that way (O.K. Service Oriented Architectures are turning
applications into "headless wonders" it's a start I guess). Also, current
approaches to application development IMHO (esp. the enterprise kind) are
just so inflexible, complicated and fragile. I see ALIN (even though I don't
really know what it is but I'm guessing) as a way out.

> I forgot the Cooperation/Coordination stuff... We've definitely
> talked about things like online Visio and shared outlining.

Not what I was really thinking of, more cooperation between independent
agents (people or software) to achieve some goal.

Being the protagonist ;-)
Robert.

[1] A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work
    http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/papers/language-action.html
[2] Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?
    http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge114.html



-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf